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"If you're going to panic, do it fast and beat the crowd." ~ Jesse Livermore

Tuesday, March 26, 2013

France is becoming another Greece

Forget Spain and Italy. It’s France that’s Greece-ifying before our very eyes – Quartz: " . . . France . . . its economy is decaying . . . rapidly. Markit’s preliminary March purchasing managers’ index—which measures monthly changes in private-sector output—came in at 42.1 (pdf), down from 43.1 in February. (Anything lower than 50 reflects a drop in output.) That’s the fastest slowdown in business activity France has seen since March 2009. And Jack Kennedy, economist at Markit, says this likely augurs a larger crumbling of the French economy. . . . To frame it in another horrifying perspective, the PMI of the euro zone’s second-largest economy was lower than that of Spain and Italy—and almost down to Greek levels (video), as Reuters’ Jamie McGeever explains. What’s most worrying is when you look at how France’s data stacked up against the euro zone’s as a whole, which were also published today. While the euro zone’s PMI (blue line) and its GDP growth (orange line) have moved pretty closely in sync, France’s PMI has become unhinged in the last couple of years. And that’s bad because, as PMI reflects business confidence, it’s typically a leading indicator of GDP growth . . . " (read more at link above)